cups and putting away the tea tin.
As I picked up his bowl to replenish his water before bedtime, I noticed what appeared to be blood smears across the floor, as if he’d nicked a paw on something sharp. Dropping down beside him, I examined each pad, but I couldn’t find a wound or any blood. I dampened a paper towel to clean up the floor, and as I turned from the sink, I saw more crimson spots. The blood was coming from me, not Angus.
I danced about, examining first one foot and then the other. As I cleaned away the blood, I saw the glitter of ground glass embedded in my skin. The particles were so fine as to be little more than powder, but the skin had been irritated in several places. Odd, because as far as I knew, nothing had shattered in the garden.
Hobbling to the bathroom, I washed the soles of my feet with antibacterial soap, picked out the glass and then doused the abrasions with peroxide and antiseptic.
The chore had given me something concrete to focus on, and now, strangely, I felt much calmer. I crawled into bed, preparing myself for another long night as I stared up at the ceiling, wishing Devlin had stayed.
I fell asleep almost instantly only to awaken sometime later to a powerful thirst. I got up and padded into the kitchen for a glass of water. Angus heard me stir and came out of my office to check his food bowl.
“Sorry. It’s not time for breakfast yet.”
Those limpid eyes appealed to the pushover in me, and I went to the cupboard to get him a treat. As I turned, I caught a glimpse of the windows in my office. Someone stood gazing in at me.
I didn’t turn but kept the silhouette in my periphery. The face had the pale translucence of a ghost, but that could have been an illusion cast by moonlight. I wondered why Angus hadn’t growled a warning. Whether human or ghost, he must have sensed another presence. But he merely stood there gobbling his treats with unabashed delight. He never lifted his head, even when another shadow appeared at the backdoor, even when the knob rattled as the intruder tried to force his way in.
I looked around for the phone and couldn’t find it. I looked around for a weapon and couldn’t find one. It was then that I realized I must be trapped in a dream. How else to explain Angus’s apathy? How else to explain my own strange paralysis?
As I stood there watching helplessly, the dead bolt clicked, and the door flew back with a bang, allowing that wind from the other side to sweep in. My hair blew across my face and, as I peeled it away, I saw Darius Goodwine on the threshold. He looked the same as he had earlier, only now he wore several necklaces, including one that looked like a string of human teeth. In his right hand, he carried a wooden bowl and, in the left, an old leather pouch which he shook to produce a rattle.
Into the bowl, he poured the contents of the pouch—bones, shells, pebbles, nuts and a few coins. Then he knelt and threw these items onto the floor. They formed a pattern which seemed to amuse him greatly.
He looked up, topaz eyes gleaming. “Prepare yourself,” he said.
“For what?”
“A long journey.”
“Where am I going?”
He turned to stare out into the darkness, and I looked past him to where the dead had assembled in my garden. Their faces were painted a stark white, their bellies open and distended. Drawn by the light, black beetles with large, snapping pincers crawled from the autopsy gashes and scurried into the house. I spotted one scuttling into the cupboard where I kept Angus’s treats, and another dashed beneath the stove.
Suddenly, his food bowl teemed with the insects, and he looked up at me with a piteous whimper. The beetles were crawling up his legs and moving down through his fur, attempting to burrow under his skin. He howled in pain, and I dropped to his side, picking them off one by one and flinging them toward the door.
But dozens turned into hundreds. The floor blackened, and I could feel them on me now. They ran up my arms, into my hair and down the collar of my pajamas.
I was still flailing when I woke up. Chest heaving, I flung the covers aside and leaped to my feet as I reached for the light. The bed was clear. My hair was clear. It had just been a dream.
Or a visit from Darius Goodwine.
I resolved myself to staying awake for the rest of the night. I even went back to my office and fetched Dr. Shaw’s book.
But my eyes soon grew heavy, and I kept nodding off despite my best efforts. The last thing I remembered hearing was a tree limb scrape against the house. In my drowsy state, it sounded like someone running across the roof.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Zombie powder,” Temple said the next morning as she helped me unload my tools from the back of the SUV. Sometime after Devlin had left my house, he’d arranged to have the car delivered and then texted to let me know where I could find the key. I had to wonder if our conversation had precipitated the dream. In the light of day, it seemed impossible that Darius Goodwine had been able to invade my sleep.
“Ground glass is a common component, along with datura,” Temple was saying. “The glass irritates the skin so that the poison is more quickly absorbed into the bloodstream.”
“Zombies in Charleston?” I glanced at her in mock horror as I locked my car and deposited the key in my pocket. “Isn’t that more of a New Orleans thing?”
“By way of Africa and Haiti. Traditionally, all we have to worry about around here are hags, haints and plat- eyes,” she said naming the holy trinity of Lowcountry legends.
“Papa used to tell stories about plat-eyes that would curl your hair,” I said. “Boo hags, too. It got so I was afraid to close my eyes at night for fear one would slip into my room and steal my skin while I slept.” But for all my shivering under the covers back then, I’d never really believed in the mythical plat-eye creatures that supposedly gobbled up willful children, nor the hags that shed their own skin at night to inhabit another’s. But haint was a colloquialism for ghost, and I’d learned all too soon that they were real.
“I can go you one better,” Temple said as we struck out through the weeds toward the cemetery gates. “I once dated a guy from Louisiana whose grandmother practiced voodoo. She claimed when she was a young woman that her brother had been turned into a zombie by a powerful priestess. He was pronounced dead by the local coroner and a funeral and burial ensued. Years later, the sister saw him in New Orleans with that same priestess. The woman had dug him up and kept him as a slave the whole time his family had thought him dead.”
“What happened to him?”
“The last the sister knew, he was still with the priestess.”
“Why didn’t she call the police?”
“Nothing the authorities could do. Nothing she could do, either, because the priestess was too powerful.”
“But you don’t believe that, do you? Not you, Miss Skeptic.”
“Of course I don’t believe it. The point is,
“But if he possesses no real power, how can he influence me?”
“Mind over matter. Just like all those mishaps we had with Ona Pearl Handy. She created a little doubt and we did the rest to ourselves. Call it the power of suggestion or a self-fulfilling prophecy. The mind has the ability to influence the body on a subconscious level. You know that.”
“The ground glass wasn’t just in my head, though. I saw the blood.”
“Yes, that it is disturbing,” she agreed. “Do you normally go outside barefoot? Enough so that it’s somewhat of a habit?”
